Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Gottschalk, the new acting principal of Bloughton High School, bent his rubbery features into a smug leer as he passed out the tests. I set the paper in front of me and watched the characters rattle across the page. My body surged with caffeine and adrenaline. An absurd confidence settled over me. I picked up my pencil and began.

  Some of the questions made me flinch: I felt the sting of Gottschalk’s pointer as it struck various points of my body. Other questions seemed totally foreign and yet I found the answers spilling from the graphite in quick, neat letters. The giddiness that overtook me was so unanticipated I didn’t know if I was about to laugh or vomit.

  Fifty questions, fifty minutes. Gottschalk clapped and there followed the cracking of a dozen pencils hitting desks. Not mine, though—I was done, and had been for a long time.

  We passed our tests up the rows. Gottschalk took them, pounded them into order, and took his seat as the bell rang. Cheers erupted; the real party could now begin. As the class left, whooping, I thought I saw the raven hair of a beautiful girl. No matter; I turned my gaze to Gottschalk. He had on his glasses and was already scratching away with a red pen. He glanced up. Our gazes met.

  Very slowly I approached. As I passed each desk, my heart leapt at the prospect of never again entering this room. I arrived at Gottschalk’s desk and stood silently as he ran a finger across handwriting I recognized as my own. I glimpsed red ink on the previous page, but not much. His pen stood poised to mark, swaying like a rattlesnake.

  Page two: no red marks. Page three: his fingers regripped the pen, but nothing. Page four: a red circle and -2; a crossed-out sentence and -4. Page five, the final page: his plump finger smudged lead as it tracked each line. Finally he flipped through the pages in reverse order, adding up the tally, and marked the final count upon the front page: -8.

  By his rubric, it was an A. I was too stunned to react.

  Gottschalk set down his red pen and removed his glasses.

  “I appreciate, Mr. Crouch, your powers of memorization. It’s possible you possess a savantlike ability in this regard. It’s also possible, I suppose, that you actually gave time and effort to the task. There are certainly many correct answers in these pages. Yet I find myself curiously unmoved. Allow me to explain. On Friday I was asked to lead this school, and over the weekend I spent a great deal of time pondering that responsibility. Those now under my purview are teachers. Teachers, in theory, teach. As acting principal, I am charged with ensuring that, at the end of the day, lessons have been learned. I cannot cut my own teaching any slack in this regard; to the contrary, I must hold myself to the highest standards. At the beginning of the semester you walked into this room unwilling to learn. I was adamant in involving you. Countless times I have pulled you to the head of the class to immerse you in the lessons to the best of my ability. The results have been discouraging. Oh, you’ve managed to regurgitate well enough. It’s a trick you have learned. But I do not condone trickery; I demand engagement. And this is where my meditation over the past weekend has brought me. Teaching is not about facts, it is about the building of character, and facts are merely the tools, as a dumbbell is a tool for building muscle. You have been the teacher today and I the student. You have taught me that an A on this test is not what you need. What you need is the maturity that will come only from engaging with that which you have so flippantly tossed aside. This, what you have handed me, was intended as a slap in the face, and I take it as such. I’m afraid I cannot turn the other cheek, Mr. Crouch. The previous principal, perhaps, but I am of different quality.”

  With that he raised the salvation of my grade point average, my mother’s pride, the sole hope of my future, and tore it in half. He put the two pieces together and tore again. Again. Again. Ragged rectangles fluttered to the desk. I thought of scooping them up in my hands and rushing to the principal’s office to reassemble and prove my score, but behind that door, too, was Gottschalk.

  “You will repeat the class,” he said, gathering the scraps in a tidy pile and lifting a trash bin. With a flick of his wrist the remnants of my exam disappeared. I wanted to reach out but my limbs were completely numb. “I look forward to starting anew with you in January.”

  Muscles in his face screwed and snaked and I imagined his smile rotted by decay into a ghastly shriek. Gottschalk replaced his glasses, straightened his papers, and picked up his pen.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  10.

  WE KEPT CLOSE TO Bloughton. We chased a tornado and picked through the upchucked coffins. We graphed the smaller proportions of a pet cemetery before going after the remains of a dachshund. We turned up several uninhabited plots in the same graveyard before discovering a mass grave some fifty bodies thick, where the dead—mostly the city burials of welfare cases and unclaimed cadavers—had been moved to free up real estate. We struck an unmarked water pipe and by the time we patched it our corpse was floating. We peed in plastic bottles, unwilling to cease our motion. We had just three weeks before the new semester began. When we did sleep, it was in the truck.

  Everywhere we went we found Polaroids. At first it was an anomaly, then it was a scattering, and by the time school began we were finding them everywhere—an impossible amount. There had to be a horrible toll to such an effort; I remembered Boggs’s whiff of sickness and wondered if it would soon overtake him. Freed from his territory, Boggs took over southeast Iowa, not just beating us to digs but repairing the ground so expertly he fooled even Harnett. When we reached the caskets, everything of value was already gone. What we did find, meticulously pinned to each body, was a recent photograph of the corpse. Harnett ripped off these portraits and mangled them in a fist, and together we imagined the matching photograph carefully pasted into the Rotters Book. As we filled in the grave, our pockets empty, Harnett seethed with fantasies of destroying the book. Me, though, I just wanted to see it one more time.

  We shared tools, but I had some of my own. When something was misplaced, even in the black of mud or white of snow, I knew it. When something broke, I fixed it. The Root never broke. I was careful. I was responsible. I was stealthy. I wore appropriate clothing. Calluses built up on my hands, huge and flat and dry as sand. I knew when to hold back. I knew when to take a risk. I could work entirely by moonlight. I modified a junked DustBuster to vacuum flakes of leftover dirt from turf and used a barber’s comb to sift the rest. I used a battery-powered hair dryer to fluff patches of grass matted by our shoes. I created a rainproof undergarment made of trash bags and duct tape and stood in the shower for ten minutes to test it. Harnett watched and grumbled that he wanted one, too. My mother would have been proud.

  Snow made an issue of footprints. We monitored weather reports and dug only before snowfalls. If the snow was thick enough, we dug in broad daylight. New graves were easy to find; heat from a corpse’s decomp could melt a blanket of snow in two days. For older graves we brought along a tin trash can and lit a fire inside and rolled it across the plot until the ground was weeping and soft. The bodies, when we reached them, were cold and less smelly, their evolution of decay momentarily halted. There was something innocent about how snowflakes touched their oblivious faces, as if they were children extending tongues to the first fall. This innocence was gutted with each flash of Boggs’s camera.

  The snow stopped falling on New Year’s Eve. By the first weekend in January it had already melted, and every Iowa lawn looked like the site of a Christmas massacre, strewn with the toppled bodies of Santa and Rudolph and Frosty. We dug faster than ever before—we were coming up empty too often, and Harnett was nervous. A few nights before the first day of school, Harnett dropped to his knees in a cemetery outside Meighsville and jabbed his finger at a scattering of rocks in the grass, insisting that Boggs had arranged them so that he would be able to tell if we dug up his Polaroid. To avoid touching the rocks, Harnett carved a slanted tunnel some fifteen feet from the headstone that allowed him to drag the coffin to the surface with ropes. It took all night and left
us dangerously exposed. I watched the horizon impatiently. Harnett pried up the lid. There was no photo inside. The scattered rocks had just been scattered rocks.

  Back at the cabin, we studied newspapers as hard as I had once studied Gottschalk handouts. Harnett’s paranoia grew. There were reports from surrounding communities of sullied cemetery lots, busted padlocks, skewed headstones, muddy tracks. In his attempt to infect the earth with hundreds upon hundreds of photographs, Boggs was getting sloppy, maybe intentionally. Eventually, Harnett fretted, regular people would start noticing commonalities in police reports. Once that happened, it was just a matter of time before a disinterment led to a discovery of Boggs’s project.

  “I can’t dig up every single grave he’s dug.” Harnett’s chair barely contained his rocking. “I can’t remove every single picture he’s buried.”

  Even as he said this, I could tell that he was wondering whether, in fact, he could. Without its being expressly stated, our mission had changed. We would dig, and use the spoils to buy the necessary staples, but our primary objective was to erase the Rotters Book and hold accountable its author. More than ever before, Harnett would need a good shovel. He brought home dozens, some purchased, others found in landfills and alleys, and riddled our backyard with them before tossing the unfit instruments into the river.

  11.

  THE SWEATSHIRT AND HOODIES I had previously worn to school had gone stiff and black. Despite the cold, I donned the duck-in-sunglasses tee I hadn’t worn since my first day at BHS. I wasn’t sure why I even showed up to kick off the new semester—some remnant of decorum or habit?—but when I took a seat in my first-period class, the desk knocked against my knees and pinched my lower back. As I crossed my arms defensively, the duck in sunglasses pulled tight across my back. I’m taller, I realized. I’m bigger. Other students hastened away their gazes as I rolled my shoulders and correlated each strap of muscle to those I had seen on the Diggers. I was like them now, except that they grew weaker each day while I grew stronger. The teacher frowned when I laughed to myself. Maybe it was all those goddamn onions, I thought.

  Biology, once again, came third period. I paused outside the room, dazed by how much smaller the hallways looked, how juvenile the students, how inconsequential the faculty. I wandered inside after the bell and took the only remaining seat, right in front. Gottschalk began by introducing himself as the new principal before praising himself for keeping his teaching gig, too. Then he began a spiel so familiar that I knew what came next—attendance, along with some mockery of people’s names—and I waited patiently through the alphabet for him to call me to the front of the class. He did.

  “No,” I replied.

  His thick lips swelled in anticipation of triumph. The words he used did not surprise me. Don’t be greedy with your talent, Mr. Crouch. You were so useful last semester, Mr. Crouch. Come help me illustrate the various units we will be covering this year, Mr. Crouch.

  I refused in silence until a curious thing happened. I heard snickering aimed at Gottschalk, not me, and in that instant I saw a flash of panic in the teacher’s eyes—if he didn’t wrest victory from me right away, his control of the entire semester might teeter. He banked by my desk and muttered to me in a low voice.

  “Get up here and we’ll let bygones be bygones.”

  Gottschalk was sweating. It was magnificent. He shuffled backward until his ass hit the chalkboard—more laughter.

  “With or without the assistance of Mr. Crouch,” he shouted, his voice ringing with alarm, “we will be taking a journey from the beginning of our existence to the very end. It’s a long journey that will become ever longer the less you are able to control yourselves—quiet down, now. We’ll begin with sperm and egg. From there we’ll move to systems, in order: the integumentary, skeletal, muscular, nervous, cardiovascular, endocrine, immune, respiratory, digestive, excretory, finally ending with the properties of decomposition.”

  “You know nothing about decomposition.”

  It was my own voice. Perhaps emboldened by all my noes, I let these five new words escape in a snort. Gottschalk was left goggling, his arm floating in some half-finished gesture. I could see the flicker of deliberation: send me from the room or take me on in hopes of winning back his class? I never doubted his decision.

  “If, Mr. Crouch, you’re referring to the fact that I am not yet dead, I’m afraid I have some relatives who would disagree.” Chuckles from the spectators, more polite than anything. “But I believe that even you, with your knowledge of biology so vast that you’re taking this class for a second time”—more chuckling—“will learn an item or two about the factors affecting decay rate, how body mass affects the process more than environment, and so forth—”

  “It’s not true,” I said. “Body size barely matters.”

  “Thank you, Professor Crouch. Now if your lecture is complete—”

  “Temperature is the biggest factor.” I could hardly believe it was my voice that was speaking, but I kept moving my lips and the words kept coming. “Second is access by insects. Third is burial conditions, and fourth is access by animals. Body mass is maybe seventh or eighth on the list.”

  A purple color was creeping up his neck. I’d never seen his teeth before, but there they were, sharp triangles of yellow rising like shark fins. “Disruption by carnivore is hardly a major concern to burials in modern-day America, Professor Crouch.”

  “You didn’t say burials,” I said. The tightness and heat that usually accompanied my public speaking had been replaced by an icy calm. “You said decay rate. These are well-known forensic results. Carnivores affect decay more than trauma, humidity, rainfall—”

  “We will not be covering carnivores in a biology class,” he hissed. “We will be covering only natural decomposition, which does not involve fauna of any sort, with the obvious exception of bugs. Now, if you’d like to continue your lesson in the principal’s office—”

  “Necrophages,” I said.

  His threat to expel me from the room had given him away. He was losing and knew it. To everyone else it must have been a comic delight, but I was locked into the kind of focus Woody must have felt when the entire season was on the line. Gottschalk stood with his bottom lip quivering, trying in vain to recollect a definition I had read a dozen times in Harnett’s lurid library.

  “I …”

  “Necrophages,” I repeated. “A species of arthropod that feeds on body tissue.”

  Gottschalk blinked.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Arthropods are bugs.”

  A whoop went up from the back of the class—Oh, damn!—and a thrill of laughter ripped through the ranks. Gottschalk looked suffocated. I rose before he had the chance to order it and met his beady eyes on my way out. There would be no more debasing me before my classmates, no more striking me with his wand. Perhaps there would be no graduation, either, but that was a possibility I was quickly learning to live with.

  I celebrated by skipping the next two classes. Somehow Ted found me pacing a rarely used hallway and with a look directed me to the band room. Was Ted why I had returned to school? I wasn’t sure. I was too preoccupied with the steely coldness that had taken hold of me, and wondering if it had come from the Diggers, Lionel, or Boggs, or if it was simply the natural extension of my oblivion and extinction. Ted pointed to my trumpet case; it sat exactly where I had left it a month ago. I just stared at him—such things were no longer part of my life. To my surprise the dorky conductor had twice the grit of Gottschalk; he won the staring contest and our covert lessons continued. As usual we exchanged no words save his parting remark: “Next lesson, then.”

  I stuck around for lunch because I was hungry. Gottschalk had wasted no time purging me from Simmons’s free-lunch list, so I paid cash. Foley was a few tables over and his presence threatened to disrupt my strange tranquility. I made a silent promise to skip lunch from here on out—he was better off without me. Like Harnett, I knew when it was time to break from my partner. A tiny
part of me mourned. I pretended it was a cockroach and did what you do to cockroaches.

  There were other recognizable shapes at the edges of my vision—Heidi, eating with one hand, paging through textbooks with another; Celeste, tiptoeing through suggestions of her dance routine; Woody and Rhino, no doubt recounting the shower incident to the requisite rapt faces—but to me they were as inanimate as something at the bottom of a hole. They were, I was pleased to note, only rotters.

  12.

  HARNETT WAS SHAKING NEWSPRINT in my face as soon as I crossed the threshold.

  “Peter and Paul Eccles.” He followed me with the page as I pulled off my shoes. “Twin frontiersmen hired to protect the last stages of the First Transcontinental Railroad. You know what that is?”

  This was my father lately: red-eyed, jumpy, implacable. I turned away from him and stripped myself of my coat. “I’m in school, aren’t I?”

  “It was the first railroad to connect the country,” he raved. “When the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Summit in Utah in 1869, they drove in a ceremonial spike to mark the final tie.”

  “Big deal.” I moved toward the sink and he kept right at my elbow.

  “It is a big deal,” he snapped. “They actually drove in four spikes that day to commemorate various rail lines, but the last spike, the so-called Golden Spike, was seventeen-point-six-karat gold, engraved on all four sides by various bigwigs. This was a major event. Do you understand the significance? The conquest of the West. The annihilation of the Indians. It’s huge, monumental.”